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bazzalunatic writes "With all the recent earthquakes, this 'human-sniffing' device couldn't be more timely. Developed in the UK, the new machine detects the breath and sweat of survivors trapped in rubble. It's better than sniffer dogs, and could reduce the risk to them. From the article: 'The sensor technology was shown to accurately detect human-generated carbon dioxide and ammonia in air that wafted through gaps in the rubble during testing, something that previously only dogs could do, as other technologies focus more heavily on seeing or hearing a survivor.'"

I was going to point out the irony of referencing Dr. Who as science as it's not exactly the most credible thing in the world, but then I realized that you are a chiropractor, so Dr. Who IS more credible than you:P

You've managed to touch briefly on actually interesting, real science. Humans automatically compensate for increased CO2 by adjusting their breathing and their metabolic levels. Curiously, humans can only detect the presence of carbon dioxide in the blood but not the absence of oxygen. This has lead to deaths in high nitrogen environments or other environments where there's very little oxygen, since people have no warning sign that they aren't getting enough oxygen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_as [wikipedia.org]

Incidentally, this makes inert gas inhalation a preferred suicide method among those without access to the harder anaesthetics: usually it involves helium, since you can get small tanks of that cheaply at party supply places, unlike nitrogen which is a welding/scientific/industrial thing(not controlled in any way; but fewer retail places, and many that might give you a funny look if you act like you don't know what you are doing there...)

Don't know about the rest of you but if a building ends up falling on me i don't think pissing my pants is going to be a conscious decision I'm going to have to make, think that might just be automatic.

Probably considered redundant and expensive now that reliable cultivation by innoculation is considered trivial (my kids sometimes work on a neighbouring truffle farm). They just work through the soil around the tree roots on a regular basis, yields are high and reliable.

It's a Tasmanian company that sells the innoculation - wild truffles aren't worth much now (and pigs are cheap).

and since practically everyone nowadays carry sophisticated personal radio beacons (aka "cell phones") that periodically transmit uniquely identifiable (on a per device basis) signals, I'm surprised no one has jumped on using this as a way of sensing where the people are.

Hm? World population is roughly 7 billion. I'm sure there's several billion mobile phone users out there. Wikipedia refers to "over 5 billion", but that might just be the number of active phones, number of users will be a bit lower.

Highly misleading. It eliminates dangers to the dogs/handlers and simplifies logistics; the article doesn't even imply that the device is more effective than dogs. It also points out that dogs are more agile and will still be more useful in areas where the machine or its human operator can't easily go (which I imagine will be a lot of places, considering that they're *digging through rubble*).

There are dogs out there that can detect cancer, for Christ sake; don't be so quick to dismiss biology in favor of technology, especially considering that a merging of the two is probably our next great frontier.

P.S. If any suspicious or sardonic person out there wants to argue that cancer dogs are some stupid myth, read the studies cited in this wikipedia article: they may be small studies, but I'm not inclined to doubt a study of a diagnostic tool showing a specificity >90% until I see a directly contrary scientific result or a damn good argument about the design of the original study.

Numerous labs are working on snake-shaped robots, some even have built them out of discrete modules that can detach and become smaller lengths. Now add in some sniffer modules, and suddenly you have robots that can go places dogs can't. Equip the modules with radio repeaters and now you can get a comm link even down into a collapsed building with a lot of metal in it. Come on, what year is it? Dogs, indeed. I'm allergic to dogs, so that's an extra reason

True; but if you are looking for survivors you want something that isn't also true of a slightly squished corpse that hasn't been exerting much sphincter control of late. Carbon dioxide isn't perfect(fires and microbial respiration also generate it); but there are reasons to choose it.